The article introduces the topic of film music's relationship to the built environment of cinema. The discussion springboards from James Sanders's analysis of New York City sets, based on the architecture of selected movies (mostly from the 1930s and 40s), as presented in his Celluloid Skyline. The focus is on four locations: the brownstone façade, the working-class street, the enclosed courtyard, and the construction site. The argument is that two key components of American cinema's structure—music and architecture—are sometimes in direct dialogue, as composers and filmmakers both render New York ethnographically accurately and offer sometimes a mythic imagining of a particular place.